hearing.
I looked at Shame. “You felt that?”
“The storm,” he said. “It’s about to break. We need to haul.”
I brushed my fingers one last time over Zay’s lips. Then I jogged across the room out to the hall. Shame was already at the stairs and heading down. He was also on his phone.
“How much longer?” Pause. “Fuck. Yes, we’ll make it.”
“How much longer?” I asked.
“Maybe ten minutes. Maybe not.” We took the stairs as fast as we could without falling, then used the side door to exit the building.
“Car’s here,” he said. “I moved it.”
Smart thinking.
We ran.
Got to the car, got in, got going.
Stone was sitting up in the backseat, his big face pressed to the window, his eyes searching the sky. He crooned, a lonely sound, and his wings trembled.
“Stay in the car, boy. It’s gonna get messy out there.”
He crooned again, but didn’t try to get out. The big lug was moving better. Maybe because there was magic coming our way, roiling across the sky. Maybe the storm was helping him. Wild magic was, after all, still magic.
Halfway across the bridge, magic rolled again, like a hot wind pushing through the car, through my skin, my bones.
I hissed, and Shame grunted. “Lord. This is gonna be such an ass-kicking,” he said. “Ours.”
He drove at a terrifying speed, one boot on the gas, both hands on the wheel, eyes narrowed in concentration. I stopped watching the traffic around us as soon as the number of impending collisions got into the vicinity of two digits.
The void stone between my breasts went warm, then pulsed cold. My skin itched.
Over the bridge now, and rolling up to the St. Johns neighborhood. Before we reached the tracks that separated St. Johns from the rest of the city, magic rumbled and rolled again, and I saw the faulty-lightbulb flicker of lightning somewhere high, high above us.
“Do you know where?” I asked.
“The bridge.”
“What is it about that bridge?” I scrubbed at my arms, but the itching only got worse. “Too many weird things happen there.”
Shame didn’t answer. We were over the railroad track and into St. Johns. Even in the darkness, St. Johns looked like it always looked. Magic never prettied it up to make it into something marketers would approve of. St. Johns wore her face bare, and even if she wasn’t perfect, she was more beautiful because of her flaws.
Broken-down, homey, unapologetic, St. Johns wore many faces. All of them the truth.
Crossing the railroad track made my teeth hurt. Not like there was no magic in St. Johns, but like there was far too much magic here.
Stone clacked a low growl and rubbed the top of his head against the back of Shame’s seat. Stone felt it too. Something was wrong. Very wrong.
Shame took the speedometer down out of death-defying, and worked off the main drag toward the towering green arc of the St. Johns Bridge.
“In the park?” I asked.
“I think so.” He got us there in too little time. Parked in the open lot and got out.
I turned to Stone. “You stay here, boy. Sleep, okay?”
Stone’s ears flattened, then perked back up. He tipped his head and looked out the window, making the bag- of-marbles sound and then the coo again. He jiggled the door handle.
“No. Don’t go out. Don’t leave the car.” I pointed at him and he let go of the handle. “Sleep,” I commanded.
He clacked, then clunked his snout against the window, ears up in triangles.
I hoped he would stay put. I didn’t want anyone in the Authority to see him. I locked the doors and stepped out.
The air had so much magic in it, it felt like it was made out of lead. It weighed on my shoulders, legs, and feet, crushing. Shame had lit up and sucked his cigarette down to half ash. His face was tipped toward the sky, his neck exposed, hood fallen away, to let his dark hair fall free from his eyes. Eyes closed, the arc of his body was taut with ecstasy as he drank the magic down.
He held the cigarette smoke captive in his open mouth, then exhaled, his mouth still open, eyes still closed in rapture.
The air broke under the impact of thunder. Shame moaned away the rest of the smoke, and took in a breath like it was his first, like he could suck down the sky and still not be full.
He opened his eyes. “Fuck yes,” he said up into the rain. “That’s what I needed. More. Much more of that.”
I finally got a full breath myself. “This is not good.”
“It’s magic. It’s never good.” Shame grinned at me. “But it’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.”
“Not if it’s wild magic.”
I’d been through a few wild-magic storms before, fast-moving tangles of lightning and thunder and magic. Beckstrom Storm Rods did their job and channeled the strikes of lightning and magic down into the glyphed channels that stored magic throughout the city.
This was different.
This storm had death on its wings.
“Come on,” I said.
I jogged across the parking lot toward the center of Cathedral Park, Shame at my side. Above us, thunder broke, the high demonic wail an earsplitting echo. Magic crackled through the sky, tracing out in flashes of glyphs.
Lights on the bridge flickered. A rolling blackout washed over the city downriver.
The void stone at my neck burned.
I ran, but my feet moved mud-slow. My breath came too quickly, too loudly. The void stone flashed cold again as lightning the color of dead roses webbed the sky with wild, elongated glyphs and spells.
Even my feet itched.
What had Maeve said? We were wearing the stones because when magic came back, the stones might help us not burn to death? Nice. And since I held magic inside me, I was in for a world of pain. Maybe Shame had the stone pressed against his neck for another reason. Like to keep him from drinking down too much energy once it hit.
What if magic wouldn’t fill me again? What if it was a onetime thing, back when Cody had pulled it through my bones? Maybe now that it was gone, it was going to stay gone, leaving nothing behind but some ribbon tattoos.
I hoped not. I had a lot of things I wanted to do with magic right now, one of them being taking out Greyson. I wanted the magic back. I wanted that power back.
The pathway parallel to the river hooked uphill. Even though it was dark, the trees weren’t leafed out enough to hide the flicker of the warehouse and factory lights on the river. I wondered if there were people there. People who were about to get hurt.
“And I repeat: fuck yes,” Shame said beside me. “That’s beauty.” He pointed.
I looked over to where the bridge angled across on huge arched pillars. Magic lingered there. A lot of it. Not from the storm, thundering like a mountain being hammered down. This magic was contained, controlled, almost mechanical in its perfection. I knew the Authority had to be behind that magic. Shame had one thing right: it was beautiful.
And I knew that magic came from the disks. Hundreds of them.
The Authority had broken into Violet’s labs and stolen these disks from her. They had hurt her, maybe killed
